Part Three: The Yardies

London Street Gangs: A modern history

Click Here for Part Two: The Farm

Part Three: The Yardies

Jamaican gangsters began moving in to Britain rapidly directly after the 1980s inner-city riots which had involved disaffected youths reluctant to embrace the exclusion and unemployment being forced upon them by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. Yardies or Posse is the name often given to a criminal gang that has its roots in Jamaica, typically a group involved in the importation and street level distribution of class A drugs. In North America, Jamaican gangs were known as Posses. One of the most infamous of the posses overseas was known as the ‘Shower Posse’. In the 1980’s the Shower Posse were believed by the FBI to have formed branches in sixteen major American cities including Miami and New York, and in Toronto in Canada. In 1988 the Shower Posse was positively identified in London after their co-leader Jim Brown was found to have made two visits to London using false identities and bogus travel documents. Whilst known as Posses in the Americas, in Britain Jamaican criminals became known as ‘Yardies’. Yardies are often credited with bringing casual gun violence to the streets of Britain’s inner cities in the late 1980s, and in London alone they were attributed to no fewer than 150 gun homicides between 1985 and 2000. Their style, structure and way of operating had a huge influence on the development and proliferation of London street gangs, a number of which were founded and led by former Posse members from Jamaica. The term Yardie in Britain actually originated as a word to ‘describe one’s home in Jamaica: the yard around the house. Thus ‘Yardie’ is simply a word a Jamaican resident in Britain uses to describe Jamaica’ (Small 1995, p.368). It is thought that the National Drugs Intelligence Unit may have coined the term Yardie, with negative connotations, in Britain as early as 1987[i]. Geoff Small, author of Ruthless: The Global Spread of the Yardies, concluded that ‘the social cost of this wholesale misrepresentation cannot be underestimated [as] it has irreparably tarnished the otherwise faultless image of the vast majority of Jamaicans, their off-spring, and – by default – every black person in Britain’ (Small 1995, p.369). Between 1987 and well into the Millennium incidences involving Black suspects of gun violence and the street distribution of drugs were labelled as ‘Yardie’ related in the national media with few exceptions. It became an all encompassing phrase attributed to the entire Black population of urban Britain involved in crime, regardless of their heritage, nationality and culture.

The posses which spread overseas from Jamaica in the 1980’s had organisational structures immediately distinguishable from any previous criminal enterprises. Whilst the American Mafia, for example, is punctuated by strict family ties and hierarchy, the posses were based on loose associations of like minded gangsters with a common interest in doing business[ii]. There was rarely an overall don, a self-proclaimed leader potentially would run the risk of being killed by their aspiring lieutenants. ‘In truth, rather than conforming to a strict demarcation of responsibilities, it was routine for posse members to perform various, often interchangeable tasks’ (Small 1995, p.254). A posse structure was typically pyramid like with three tiers. At the top are the dons, their role being the co-ordination, supply and distribution of drugs, maintaining control, shaping development, and counting and laundering proceeds of crime[iii]. The posses set up their activities in law-abiding Jamaican communities which had established overseas, a welcoming environment where they ‘sought shelter, protection and sustenance for their nefarious activities’ (Small 1995, p.255). The upper tier limited its contact with the middle echelon, whose role was to oversee the day-to-day management of the posse. They recruited workers, they ensured street level dealers were supplied with drugs, and they collected the proceeds. The bottom tiers, the workers, were the underclass, criminals and the unemployed in need of income. Their job was the dirty work, selling drugs, acting as look outs, working as mules and handlers of drugs and weapons. It was also the most volatile tier where pushes to take over or maintain custom led to serious violence and frenzied shooting matches. Workers recruited by posses in Britain after the mid-1980s increasingly were Black British young men[iv]. ‘Posse members were the men of a thousand faces. Thus the mythical overseers might use a different name with every worker he came into contact with. So, in the unlikely event that a dealer was apprehended and considered helping the police with their enquiries, they would only be able to identify their putative boss as ‘Longers’, ‘Stick’, ‘Billy’, or whatever...They may just know him by a nickname or a street name. And that same person may have a different street name in every area of the country that he goes...so identifying anyone of real significance in the organisation is very, very difficult...the dons and overseers learned the value of bogus identities, aliases and travel documents in Jamaica’ (Small 1995, p.258-259).

The first murder attributed to the Yardies in London was that of Nigerian drug dealer Innocent Egbulefu in 1986. He was thrown out of a window; however, a more common method of killing by the posse members was through gunplay. Between 1986 and 1988 there were five documented gun homicides perpetrated by Yardies in London. In May 1986, Derek Walters was standing in the doorway of the Queens Head pub in Stockwell, south London, when a blue Mercedes pulled up outside. A man exited the vehicle, armed with a shotgun, and calmly walked up to 31-year-old DJ Walters and blasted him in the head with a shotgun at point-blank range. It was alleged that Derek Walters was involved with coke dealers[v]. Less than a week later a member of the door staff at Cynthia’s nightclub in Acre Lane, near Brixton, was shot through the head as he tried to stop a group of Jamaicans entering. It was thought that they were in search of rival coke dealer who they believed was in the club[vi]. A year later, in May 1987, Michael ‘Mickey’ St George Williams, 31, from Stoke Newington was found by a passer-by still breathing but slumped over the steering wheel after his car, a dark blue Porsche, crashed into a tree in Stamford Hill. A post mortem examination revealed that he had died from gunshot wounds to the upper torso. Scotland Yard dismissed speculation that he was killed in a gangland vendetta[vii]. However, they were off the mark. Customers at the Bronx club in Stoke Newington recalled seeing Mickey arguing about the spoils of an armed robbery, he had wanted to invest it in cocaine whilst Leroy ‘Fitz’ Hughes, a reggae guitarist, and Norman ‘Bicycle’ Campbell, a paranoid psychotic who had recently been released from Park Lane security hospital in Liverpool, wanted their share. The amount was rumoured to be in the region of £100,000, gained from a jewellery heist[viii] [ix]. When Williams left the club that evening he was shot dead, Bicycle blasted him with a shotgun. Both Bicycle and Fitz were convicted of murder in January 1988. Just a few months later a cousin of Norman ‘Bicycle’ Campbell, Barron ‘Dangermouse’ Campbell and an accomplice shot rival coke dealer Alwyn ‘Shankie’ Alfred of Chiswick in the head at the Priory Centre in South Acton, west London. The accomplice was Trevor ‘Sammy Dread’ Miller, he was wanted for three political murders in Jamaica before coming to England in January 1987. The court heard how Sammy Dread was smiling as he blasted Shankie’s head away with a shotgun[x]. He would be deported on completion of his sentence. The fifth murder was that of Rohan ‘Yardie Ron’ Barrington Barnet in August 1988, a successful drug dealer who specialised in cannabis and cocaine.

When the posses set up shop their first phase begins with a trusted ‘spy’ being dispatched to stake out potential locations. Their mission would be to report back to the don with information on the strength of the host drug dealing organisation, drug users’ drugs of choice, suitable retail outlets and so on. If these diverse factors measured up soldiers would move in to seize the new territory[xi]. How this worked across London varied. In some areas posse members worked with British born criminals, including those of Caribbean descent, in other areas they moved into uncontested territory, and inevitably areas where they were unwelcome became urban battlefields. Barrington Foster, who was born in Britain, recalls the friction with Jamaican arrivals back in the early 1980’s. "I mixed with them, but I didn’t do crimes with them. They used to think they could come and bully the British-born. We’d say, “Don’t come that shit with us”. When they’d come to parties for instance, they’d come up to you and say buy me a drink. One time I was in the bathroom in a club in Balham, building a spliff when one of these Yardies came in with his mate, and he said, “You might as well get the rest out, because we’re taking it off you, English boy!” I said, “OK, I’ll go and get it”, so I went into the cubicle, pulled out my gun and came back and said, “Who the fuck are you saying ‘English boy’?” They started shitting themselves. I said: “This is England. It ain’t Jamaica”. ‘We had that rivalry where that first wave of Yardies coming over, they thought that they could bully us and tax us. A lot of the English or British-born did cave in – they found it quite difficult – but we weren’t standing for it. So a lot of the times I had to draw my gun and I’ll be quite honest, I would have used it because they were bullies, and they were trying to take from us. If they’d heard we’d been on a job, they tried to tax us. At that time, they didn’t have the numbers so much. So you’d only have two together and they’d be frightened. I’d tell them: “I can go anywhere in south-west London and get you taken care of. I can go east London and get you taken care of. These guns we’ve got, they come from white men in north London, so if you fuck about, people from another race will hit you”. These Yardies tried to scare you with fear of their mouth, but there were a few of us who’d say this is our country. We can get things you can’t get[xii]." Fosters grandparents were Jamaican, having come to London in the 1950’s, settling in Balham. Another person who recalls the relationship between Yardies and the British born youths was Tony Miller, known then as Younger T. "When the Yardies came over I had to learn a new way of culture, and a way of surviving on the street. They became the name brand and all the guys in Brixton started to try and speak like the Yardies. Then there was like a war between the young British boys and the Yardies. I was unfortunately involved in one incident on Railton Road and nearly lost my life because he tried to rob me, but I came back with my brother and battered him – a Jamaican. This guy tried to rob me. He asked for a cigarette. I said “I ain’t got one”. He said he’d cut me all over. I went and found him later in a gambling club, went downstairs and battered him with a hammer. I didn’t see myself as having an aggressive or violent nature, I saw myself as a thief. Eventually I started building relationships with some of the Yardie guys and I became close with them in terms of drugs, and I built up a career. From sixteen or seventeen I got into cocaine and became a dealer, and moved from burglaries and street crime and became a pick-pocketer. The money I got from pick-pocketing, I spent on cocaine, and it was a vicious circle. With the cocaine I was mixing with people all over London. I had exclusive clients – not Brixtonians. They were businessmen in the city and in big corporate organisations[xiii]."

In September 1986, four drug couriers were arrested at Gatwick airport, uncovering an international drugs network between London and Jamaica. West Indian Tailor Parnell Perkins, also known as Bird, was said to have earned a fortune running the network and organising teams of young female couriers to bring drugs into Britain concealed in specially made girdles. Perkins lived a ‘flash’ lifestyle with expensive jewellery and cars, including a £19,000 Mercedes and £9,000 Ford Escort XR3i. He also owned two houses in Jamaica and had numerous bank accounts where over £250,000 had been deposited. There was no doubt that Perkins was the ring leader and organiser of the network, which he co-ordinated from a flat in Debden House on the Broadwater Farm Estate. Perkins, who was described as intelligent and articulate, was quite unscrupulous in his use of women throughout the network who fell under his spell. No fewer than six women formed part of the upper and middle tiers of Perkins’ network. Through his contacts, Perkins arranged the importation of 126 kilos of cannabis into Britain, estimated then at a value of £468,000. His common-law wife and her mother, who were from Hornsey, were in control of the finances, playing banker to Perkins. His common-law-wife, who was a former clerical assistant with the Inland Revenue, held four bank accounts which were used to keep proceeds from the conspiracy whilst also being responsible for arranging the laundering of money through various transactions and deposits. Described as the ‘Banker’, she was a young mother of three children who played an important role, but prior to meeting Perkins she’d led a blameless life. It seemed she reluctantly became involved when the conspiracy crept up on her and overwhelmed her. Her own mother played the role of ‘banking messenger’. When her home on the Campsbourne Estate was searched officers found banknote wrappers and details of bank and building society accounts. The open and naive lady had become involved through her own daughter.

Next in line were Perkins’ ‘partners’ who were based in Kingston, Jamaica. They were known as Blacker Dush and Audrey Brown. Their role was to recruit pretty young women to act as drug mules and to arrange for the drugs to be collected and concealed on them before leaving Kingston. Two more women from north London, a 31-year-old market street trader from Upper Edmonton and her 28-year-old unemployed sister from Lower Edmonton, were responsible for laundering and storing proceeds, and it is assumed collecting the couriers on their arrival into Britain. Perkins was also in a relationship with the elder north London sister who thought that she was pregnant by him. Each of these women had direct contact with the lower echelon, who knew Parnell Perkins only as ‘Bird’. In Jamaica, the young girls recruited by Dush and Brown were supplied with drugs, cannabis, which was collected from a coffee shop in Kingston. Specially designed girdles, under garments around the lower torso, were used to conceal the drugs. The couriers, or mules, then covered themselves in distinctive dresses that would help identify them at the other end of their journey. They would travel from Kingston airport through Miami and Gatwick London in transit to Brussels. When the couriers arrived to Brussels they were met by a new pair of couriers, spotting the dresses provided by the gang, and exchanged the girdles in the ladies lavatory. The couriers were given up to £800 spending money, those who arrived in Britain were said to have been paid between £2-3,000 in their hotels. Perkins and his common-law wife were thought to be responsible for the wholesale of drugs to mid-level dealers in north London, not directly connected with the network. The money obtained from the sale of cannabis in Britain, the networks immense assets, was stored in Selfridges safety deposit boxes by the two north London sisters. The final member of the network of note was a young illegal immigrant from Jamaica. He had entered Britain having made a false passport application and was entrusted to store cannabis at his home. It is thought that drugs were divided and distributed from here after a raid later uncovered scales, two automatic pistols, a homemade silencer and 27 rounds of ammunition.

Customs and Excise led the investigation which had rumbled Parnell Perkins network, believing them to have made at least 14 successful runs from Jamaica. During the course of the investigation they traced buyers of the airline tickets, checked hotel records and even traced telephone calls made from hotels in Brussels to the flat in Debden House, Broadwater Farm. They believed that Perkins made up to £500,000 from his activities. In 1986, the year in which Perkins’ network was uncovered, the government passed the Drugs Trafficking Offences Act (1986). It was the first act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which specifically dealt with the laundered proceeds of drug trafficking, coming into effect on 1 January 1987. A team of 35 Customs and Excise officers was organised to coincide with the introduction of the new powers, their remit to track down the assets of convicted drug traffickers to enable courts to make confiscation orders. The customs team included trained financial intelligence officers, all of whom were experts in banking and accounting procedures. The new act enabled them to gain access to bank accounts and Inland Revenue files, as well as the ability to seek seizure orders on properties, cars and other possessions[xiv]. On 22 January 1988 Perkins was jailed for 12 years whilst Judge Kenneth Cooke, sitting at Southwark Crown Court, examined the finances of the network with a view to making the biggest sequestration order applied for by Customs since the Drugs Trafficking Offences Act came into force. Perkins, who had bank accounts in Jamaica, Nova Scotia and the United Kingdom was ordered to forfeit a then record £330,000 in confiscated profits, seized under the newly created confiscation of assets law. His common-law wife was jailed for seven years and also ordered to forfeit £57,000, plus her Ford Escort XR3i and £3,000 from her bank accounts. The mother-in-law was jailed for two years and the two north London sisters were given terms of between 12 and 18 months, all for their involvement in the laundering of drugs money. The two-and-a-half month trial cost the tax payer £45,000, minimal in comparison to the proceeds later recovered and sent to the treasury. It’s unknown what connection Perkins organisation may have had with the ‘Broadwater Farm Posse’, and whether or not the recipients of the smuggled marijuana, or ‘workers’, were local youth on the estate. With its unwanted reputation as lawless, resulting from the riots, policing with unnecessary force and racial discrimination of non-white residents became a common complaint of those trying to rebuild the Farm. Whilst the community activists waged their legitimate battles, running parallel was the continuation of criminal gang activity from a new generation that were known as the ‘Totten’am Boys’ or the ‘Frontliners’, composed of both British and non-British born youths. Whilst the Frontliners were in their infancy and growing, officials from the police and the Home Office were busy drawing up plans to deport Jamaican musician ‘Ranking Dread’

Ranking Dread, sometimes spelt as Rankin’ Dread, is thought to have first entered Britain in 1978 where he soon became a fixture at the Four Acres Club in Dalston, east London. Lloyd Coxsone, operator of the Sir Coxsone sound system, was the club owner and gave Ranking Dread a spot as a DJ[xv]. His first experiences as a deejay earning recognition were with the Ray Symbolic sound system in Jamaica in the 1970s[xvi] before moving to London. He released his first album, Girls Fiesta, in 1978 and in 1980 released a popular single ‘Fatty Boom Boom’, however, his recording career was over soon after[xvii]. Ranking Dread was born as Winston Brown in 1955 although he was also known by up to twenty aliases including Robert Blackwood, Michael Dicks, Errol Codling and Boyark, or Bowyark. By 1987 Scotland Yard and the National Drugs Intelligence Unit (NDIU) had gathered intelligence files on ‘Yardie mobsters’ in Britain who they believed were out to control ‘West Indian’ crime. Amongst their hit list was Ranking Dread who they believed to be involved in drugs, prostitution and gangland murders[xviii]. It is thought that Ranking Dread left Jamaica as a fugitive, wanted for questioning in connection with a string of crimes which included the shootings of four police officers. In Jamaica he’d reportedly been an enforcer under JLP (Jamaican Labour Party) don Claude Massop who led a posse in the ‘garrisons’ around Rema, Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town in Kingston, Jamaica. Massop’s JLP aligned group would later become known as the Shower Posse and Ranking Dreads alias of Boyark was linked to the killings of at least 29 drug dealing rivals aligned with PNP (People’s National Party) posses. After jumping bail for one of the police officer shootings he fled to London under the name of Errol Codling in 1978 and after authorities failed to extradite him from Britain a year later he set up base from an address in Darenth Road, Stamford Hill[xix]. Ranking Dread became a recognised name and face across Black London including Stoke Newington, Clapton, Brixton and Peckham. He also moved throughout Britain and abroad, having set up networks in Nottingham and New York. In fact, Ranking Dread was deported from the United States in 1983 after receiving a conviction for possession of cannabis. From his base in Stamford Hill and Stoke Newington in north London Ranking Dread established a drinking club, a prostitution network, and through armed robbery funded a series of shipments of cannabis to both Britain and the United States[xx].

In 1986 Ranking Dread became Scotland Yard’s number one suspect in the murder of Nigerian drug dealer Innocent Egbulefu who was thrown out of the window of a high-rise flat in Islington, eight floors at a height of ninety feet. It’s thought that Egbulefu double-crossed Ranking Dread and his associates by selling them a consignment of marijuana concocted of herbs and tea leaves. Returning shortly after examining their fake product, the men forced their way back into the flat, during which time Egbulefu ended up plunging to his death. The events had happened so quickly that Egbulefu was still holding the remote control unit for his television set[xxi]. In May 1988 investigative television series, The Cook Report, labelled Ranking Dread as the head of Shower Posse operations in the United Kingdom in their exposé of the Yardies. Programme presenter Roger Cook singled out Ranking Dread as a Jamaican Mafia-like master villain. Cook intercepted him walking down a busy London street, but when these accusations were put to the man himself he coolly denied them without even breaking his stride. Ranking Dread’s street reputation also did not go unchallenged and at least one-attempt at taking over his business interests was documented whereby a British born teen attacked him with a machete in a London shebeen. He had a number of very close scrapes, some people putting his escapes down to his belief in Obeah, a folk magic and religious practice in the West Indies derived from West Africa. Some gang members believe that occult rituals can protect them in gang fights by cursing their rivals, and even protect themselves from bullets. It seems though that one thing they cannot protect against is law enforcement. At 5.38AM on 14 April 1988 police officers raided a shebeen at 19a Clapton Way, east London. The derelict property owned by Hackney Council had become a focal point for serious and organised crime, particularly the trafficking of cocaine. Following several weeks’ surveillance a team of thirty-two officers stormed the address and arrested twenty suspects including Rankin Dread. As well as the arrest police recovered several weapons including a machete. Small quantities of cannabis and cocaine were discovered, however, there were no firearms or crack[xxii]. Under the name of Errol Codling, Ranking Dread was allowed bail by magistrates at Highbury, having been accused of possessing cocaine and cannabis with intent to supply. Three accomplices from Stoke Newington, Penge and Balham were bailed on similar charges[xxiii]. A few months after the raid in east London a close friend of Ranking Dread was killed in an early morning shoot-out in Harlesden, north-west London. Rohan ‘Yardie Ron’ Barrington Barnet, 26, took two bullets to the chest as ten rounds were discharged. Yardie Ron fired at two of his rivals, both of whom were wounded, before he was bundled into a vehicle and taken to St Charles Hospital in Notting Hill, west London, where he died. At the scene Detectives recovered spent shells from three high-calibre firearms including a 9mm. The scene displayed all the hallmarks of a ‘Yardie’ incident, the highly public exhibition of violence failed to turn up any witnesses and police attributed the killing to a drugs feud[xxiv]. On 8 November 1988 a decision was made not to try Ranking Dread, 31, in Britain for drugs charges. Instead Home Office officials decided to deport him and he was flown to Jamaica with two detectives from Scotland Yard[xxv]. Shortly after being deported from Britain Ranking Dread fled to Toronto, in July 1989, where he went on to serve a 12-month sentence for assaulting a police officer. He was again deported back to Jamaica in November 1992 after his attempts at gaining refugee status were unsuccessful, passing away in a Jamaican prison four years later. 

Through the 18-months prior to Ranking Dread’s arrest police had assembled the ‘Yardie Squad’, otherwise known as Operation Lucy which was designed as an intelligence gathering unit, and meant basically targeting anybody who was associated with Jamaican criminals. The objective of Operation Lucy was to prevent Yardies making further inroads within criminal networks in Greater London. The result of the database was constructing information on a drug distribution set-up involving 200 suspected criminals, spanning the United Kingdom, predominantly in the major urban areas of London, Birmingham and Manchester (Small 1995). Furthermore, it had catalogued 3,000 incidents and resulted in the deportation of fifty illegal immigrants (Thompson 1995). Shortly after Ranking Dread’s arrest the unit disbanded. A succession of reasons were put forward as to why including, in no particular order, political incorrectness and even racism for having an operation targeting only Black criminals; the expense of the operation could not be justified; it was counter-productive in progressing ‘community policing’; or that the Yardie problem had been brought under control (Thompson 1995; Small 1995). It was in fact replaced in response to a more pressing social menace: crack-cocaine. Together police and customs launched a national joint taskforce to deal with crack, the cocaine derived drug, on 1 December 1989. The new unit was designated initially for a period of six months under the command of Douglas Tweddle, a senior Customs drugs investigator. Working in collaboration with Chief Superintendent Derek Todd, head of Scotland Yard drug squad, the unit was aimed at those criminals involved in the trafficking of cocaine. There had been 300 kilograms of cocaine seized in the preceding 12-months by Customs, although at the time little intelligence was available which could connect traffickers with the street distribution level. The street level dealers would be targeted through focussing on couriers of smaller amounts, typically young women, who smuggled cocaine wrapped in condom packages in their digestive tracts. Seperately CICU, the Crack Intelligence Co-ordinating Unit was set up within the Metropolitan Police after the disbanding of Operation Lucy, although it is unclear how this sat within the governance of the joint work with Customs. According to Chief Supt Todd, the manufacture of crack-cocaine was increasing - there had been 87 seizures throughout England between January and October 1989[xxvi].

Cocaine coming into Britain primarily originated from Latin America, with most cocaine grown and processed in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, travelling via the Caribbean and the United States and also via the Iberian Peninsula. Later routes came to exist via West African nations, notably Nigeria, and finally the Netherlands. The crack epidemic that hit the United States from the late 1980’s did not materialise to the same extent in the United Kingdom. Perhaps it is the closer proximity of the United States to source countries? In the United Kingdom another drugs menace, heroin, was much more prevalent – in weight terms seizures were seven times greater for heroin than for cocaine. Heroin coming into Britain in the 1980’s was largely thought to be via those of ‘South Asian’[xxvii] and Chinese heritage, the former of which collectively made up Britain’s largest ethnic minority. The two main heroin producing regions in the world border ‘South Asia’ (The Golden Crescent – Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan) and China (The Golden Triangle – Burma, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam). Another route, which would later dominate in the United Kingdom, was through Turkey and the Balkans region.

Click Here for Part Four: Operation Shampoo

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[i] Davis, S. & Greig, G. (1987) ‘Spectrum: Yardies spark new gangster fear in Britain’, The Sunday Times, 25 October.

[ii] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies. London: Warner Books.

[iii] ibid

[iv] ibid

[v] Thompson, T. (1995). Gangland Britain. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

[vi] ibid

[vii] Sapsted, D. (1987) ‘Driver in crash had been shot’, The Times, 25 May.

[viii] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies. London: Warner Books.

[ix] Thompson, T. (1995). Gangland Britain. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

[x] Court Reporter (1989) ‘Yardie jailed for life; Trevor Miller’, The Times, 9 May.

[xi] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies. London: Warner Books.

[xii] McLagan, G. (2005). Guns and Gangs: The inside story of the war on our streets. London: Allison & Busby. P.25-26.

[xiii] Ibid p.30.

[xiv] Evans, M. (1986) ‘Impact of new legislation on assets of convicted drug traffickers’, The Times, 17 October.

[xv] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies. London: Warner Books.

[xvi] Barrow, S. & Dalton, P. (2003). The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3^rd Edition, p. 274, Rough Guides.

[xvii] Moskowitz, D.V. (2006). Caribbean Music: An Encyclopedia of Reggae, Mento, Ska, Rock Steady, and Dancehall, p.246, Greenwood Press.

[xviii] Johnson, A. & Murtagh, P. (1988) ‘Shanty town gangs that Met wants to nip in the bud’, The Guardian, 25 February.

[xix] Thompson, T. (1995). Gangland Britain. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

[xx] ibid

[xxi] ibid

[xxii] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies. London: Warner Books.

[xxiii] Court Reporter (1988) ‘Four on drug charges’, The Times, 16 April.

[xxiv] Small, G. (1995). Ruthless: The Global Rise of the Yardies. London: Warner Books.

[xxv] Sharrock, D. (1988) ‘Yardie leader sent to Jamaica’, The Guardian, 9 November.

[xxvi] Rose, D. (1989) ‘New task force to tackle crack’, The Guardian, 2 December.

[xxvii] A government term used to define those of Bengali, Indian and Pakistani origin